A review by siria
The Hidden Goddess by M.K. Hobson
3.0
It's been several years since I read the first book in this series, The Native Star, so the previous adventures of Emily Edwards and Dreadnought Stanton were far from fresh in my mind when I began The Hidden Goddess. Still, this novel almost stood alone and I could pick up the threads again without too much difficulty. M.K. Hobson has a knack for writing page turners, even when as in The Hidden Goddess the pacing is all off and the characters repeatedly fail to talk to one another in a manner that I normally find quite frustrating.
Emily is still a great main character: sympathetic, trying to do the right thing, but sometimes overwhelmed or making poor or selfish choices because she's running on limited information. Her relationship with Dreadnought Stanton was at once realistically drawn (falling in love and getting engaged is not the end point of a relationship) and deeply frustrating (the too-crowded final section of the book brings some revelations about Stanton's past that... well, if I were Emily, I'd have dumped him.)
One of the bigger flaws I remember from the first book is that the Native American characters featured seemed to be there solely to sacrifice themselves for white people. In this book, the big bad is the Aztec goddess Itztlacoliuhqui (who, I discovered when I googled, is actually a god in the Aztec pantheon, and whose gender swap appears to have been in the service of one of the more frustrating reveals at the end of the book), who is all savage blood lust and destructive urges, who is confined to a temple in Mexico that's strewn with dismembered body parts, and who is described as "dumb as a bag of hammers." Everyone who serves this goddess and actually does something to move her plans forward? A white American. Yeesh.
Emily is still a great main character: sympathetic, trying to do the right thing, but sometimes overwhelmed or making poor or selfish choices because she's running on limited information. Her relationship with Dreadnought Stanton was at once realistically drawn (falling in love and getting engaged is not the end point of a relationship) and deeply frustrating (the too-crowded final section of the book brings some revelations about Stanton's past that... well, if I were Emily, I'd have dumped him.)
One of the bigger flaws I remember from the first book is that the Native American characters featured seemed to be there solely to sacrifice themselves for white people. In this book, the big bad is the Aztec goddess Itztlacoliuhqui (who, I discovered when I googled, is actually a god in the Aztec pantheon, and whose gender swap appears to have been in the service of one of the more frustrating reveals at the end of the book), who is all savage blood lust and destructive urges, who is confined to a temple in Mexico that's strewn with dismembered body parts, and who is described as "dumb as a bag of hammers." Everyone who serves this goddess and actually does something to move her plans forward? A white American. Yeesh.